Does the Samsung Galaxy S Pen Creator Edition support Air Commands?

Quick answer: Yes, the S Pen Creator Edition supports Air Commands. All you need to do is hover the stylus over the screen and press the button to summon the menu.

The S Pen has been around since late 2011, and it’s seen many revisions since then. What started as an accessory solely for the Note series phones quickly expanded to tablets and laptops in the following years. In 2021, ten years after the stylus debuted, Samsung released the S Pen Pro, a chunky competitor for the Apple Pencil that was meant to be the S Pen to rule them all.

Now that’s been superseded by the S Pen Creator Edition, where so many strange choices were made that it leaves us asking questions that would normally have obvious answers. In this case, does this new stylus support Air Commands?

Does the Samsung Galaxy S Pen Creator Edition support Air Commands?

Air Command was introduced with the Galaxy Note 3, a year after the Note 2 was able to detect the S Pen hovering above its screen. To use Air Commands, you hover the pen over the screen until the cursor appears and press the button. The Air Command menu can be configured with a plethora of shortcuts, from apps to system commands. If you use it constantly, a floating Air Command button can be added to the screen that will appear whenever the stylus is connected.

Thankfully, the S Pen Creator Edition supports this feature, so you can tap the button to swap between pen and eraser in drawing apps or summon screenshot tools.

How does Air Command work?

The S Pen Creator Edition controversially lacks Bluetooth, so you may wonder how Air Command functions. Thankfully, Air Command and hover detection have never required Bluetooth to work. Bluetooth gestures aside, the S Pen doesn’t need a battery. Devices that support the stylus emit a small field of energy from the display, and a capacitor inside the S Pen draws from that field for power. In doing so, it causes a change in the field that the phone can detect, allowing it to locate the stylus when it’s hovering just short of the screen.

Pressing the button on the side of the S Pen alters the frequency that the phone detects, so it knows the button has been pressed. So, despite the lack of Bluetooth, Air Command and hover work just fine with the S Pen Creator Edition.